Transcript Everything Bad Is Good For You, Part I Notes

Everything Bad Is Good
For You
Steven Johnson
The Elite Perspective
• “Ours is an age besotted with graphic
entertainments. And in an increasingly
infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is
reducible to a celebration of ‘choice,’ adults are
decreasingly distinguishable from children in
their absorption in entertainments and the kinds
of entertainments they are absorbed in – video
games, computer games, hand-held games,
movies on their computers and so on. This is
progress: more sophisticated delivery of
stupidity.” (George Will)
The Sleeper Curve
• What is the sleeper curve?
The Sleeper Curve
• What is the sleeper curve?
– Popular culture is becoming more
intellectually demanding, not less.
The Sleeper Curve
• What is the sleeper curve?
– Popular culture is becoming more
intellectually demanding, not less.
• Emphasis on cognition over content:
– “Today’s popular culture may not be showing
us the righteous path. But it is making us
smarter” (14).
Games
• “The intellectual nourishment of reading books is
so deeply ingrained in our assumptions that it’s
hard to contemplate a different viewpoint. But
as McLuhan famously observed, the problem
with judging new cultural systems on their own
terms is that the presence of the recent past
inevitably colors your vision of the emerging
form, highlighting the flaws and imperfections”
(18).
• What if games came first? (see page 19)
Games
• Different media are “good at” different
tasks, therefore we should view a
particular medium as a specialized tool:
– “The very fact that I am presenting this
argument to you in the form of a book and not
a television drama or a video game should
make it clear that I believe the printed word
remains the most powerful vehicle for
conveying complicated information…” (23).
Games
•
Two arguments
1. “By almost all the standards we use to
measure reading’s cognitive benefits –
attention, memory, following threads, and so
on – the nonliterary popular culture has
been steadily growing more challenging over
the past thirty years” (23).
Games
•
Two arguments
2. “Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture
is honing different mental skills that are just
as important as the ones exercised by
reading books” (23).
Games
• Evidence:
– The increasing difficulty level of videogames.
Compare Pong or PacMan to Everquest or
Ultima.
– The emergence of “game guides.”
– The SimCity 2000 example.
• Why are children able to internalize sophisticated
sets of rules while playing games, but seem to
have more difficulty in the classroom?
Games
• Neurological reward circuitry:
– “The dopamine system is a kind of
accountant: keeping track of expected
rewards, and sending out an alert – in the
form of lowered dopamine levels – when
those rewards don’t arrive as promised” (34).
– Seeking circuitry: “Where our brain wiring is
concerned, the craving instinct triggers a
desire to explore” (35).
Games
• Neurological reward circuitry
– The Tetris example.
– “Just as Tetris streamlines the fuzzy world of
visual reality to a core set of interacting
shapes, most games offer a fictional world
where rewards are larger, and more vivid,
more clearly defined, than life” (36).
Games
• Games harness and manipulate “seeking”
behavior in players based upon the
neurological reward circuitry!
– “In the initial stages of play, you may be
dazzled by the game’s graphics. But most of
the time, when you’re hooked on a game,
what draws you in is an elemental form of
desire: the desire to see the next thing” (37).
Games
• How do we seek (and make decisions) in
games?
– Probing
– Telescoping
• Probing describes the active learning that
occurs when new knowledge is acquired
based on real-time interaction with a
system. In the past, this has been referred
to as “tinkering.”
Games
• Probing makes casual use of the scientific
method:
– James Paul Gee: 1. Probe, 2. Hypothesize,
3. Reprobe, 4. Rethink.
• “Probing often takes the form of seeking
out the limits of the simulation, the points
at which the illusion of reality breaks down,
and you can sense that’s all just a bunch
of algorithms behind the curtain” (45).
Games
ENEMIES MOVE IN
PREDICTABLE
PATTERNS
Games
• Telescoping: The player’s ability to
coordinate among immediate,
intermediate, and long-term goals.
• Telescoping IS NOT Multitasking.
Games
• One of the most important things in
understanding the intellectual benefits of
gaming is to separate cognition from
content. In some respects, videogame
puzzles strongly resemble word problems
that you might find on an SAT or GRE.
• Games are about learning how to make
decisions which create order out of chaos.
Television
• The same thesis that applied to games – that
content is not an indicator of cognitive
complexity – can be applied to television.
• Television programs have become vastly more
complex since the advent of the medium.
– “So if we’re going to start tracking swear words and
wardrobe malfunctions, we ought to at least include
another line on the graph: one that charts the
cognitive demands that televised narratives place on
their viewers. That line, too, is trending upward at a
dramatic rate” (63).
Television
• Television has grown in cognitive
complexity in at least two areas:
– Multiple threading.
– Flashing arrows.
– Social networks.
Television
• Multiple threading
– “Part of the cognitive work comes from
following multiple threads, keeping often
densely interwoven plotlines distinct in your
head as you watch. But another part involves
the viewer’s ‘filling in’: making sense of
information that has been either deliberately
withheld or deliberately left obscure” (63).
Television
• Multiple threading
– Dragnet (single thread)
– Starsky and Hutch (elementary double thread)
– Hill Street Blues (multiple threads + thematic
complexity)
– The Sopranos (multiple threads + thematic
and structural complexity)
Television
• Flashing arrows
• Texture (total visual information in a
scene) Vs. Substance (the information in
the scene that you need to know in order
to understand the narrative).
• Flashing arrows are those cinematic
devices (e.g., camera/editing techniques
and conventions) that separate substance
from texture.
Television
• Flashing arrows “reduce the amount of
analytic work you need to make sense of a
story. All you have to do is follow the
arrows” (74).
• When flashing arrows are removed,
audiences must concentrate in order to
understand what’s happening. Think of
West Wing, ER, 24.
Television
• Another byproduct of the loss of flashing
arrows is the requirement of a tolerance of
ambiguity in the viewer. Much like in
games, a viewer must be willing to
temporarily deal with confusion and
uncertainty. The viewer must also be
adept at learning ‘on the fly’ and
generating/testing hypotheses about
outcomes.
Television
• What about comedy?
– The roles of intertextuality and “in-joking”
– The need for multiple viewings (in market
terms, this also anticipates syndication).
• The Simpsons
• Seinfeld
• The Critic
Television
• What about Reality Television?
– A relationship between reality programming
and gaming. If early TV took it’s cues from
vaudeville and three-act stage plays, Reality
TV takes its cues from the world of the game.
– Partially defined rules and the need to
cultivate tolerance of ambiguity, learn on the
fly, and make/test hypotheses.
– Navigating social environments.
Television
• Social intelligence: The ability to read and
interpret the emotions and motivations of
others. The AQ score.
– “Reality shows, in turn, challenge our
emotional intelligence and our AQ. They are,
in a sense, elaborately staged group
psychology experiments…” (99).
Television
• The importance of social intelligence:
– “Thanks to our biological and cultural
heritage, we live in large bands of interacting
humans, and people whose minds are skilled
at visualizing all the relationships in those
bands are likely to thrive, while those whose
minds have difficulty keeping track are
invariably handicapped” (109).
Television
• Reality TV and politics? Using AQ and
social intelligence to evaluate candidates?
– What would Postman say? (see pgs. 100101)
– What do you think about this argument?
Television
• Social networks:
– It isn’t only reality television that has the
potential to improve social intelligence. Think
of how the level of intricacy in the
relationships among television characters has
increased
• From Dallas to 24.
Internet and Film
• The Internet
– Supporting material
– Interface comprehension
– From television to Google?
• Is film ‘tapped out’ in terms of its ability to
teach us?
Conclusion
• The importance of collateral learning…
– Form vs. Content
– What does the form require of us cognitively?